The Great Leadership Departure

Amid news that the Great Resignation is morphing into a pre-pandemic pattern of leavers and stayers comes news from executive search consultancy Challenger, Gray, and Christmas that CEO departures are up 47% and rising in the corporate sector. Corporate CEOs are still bailing out, which we are seeing among heads of schools as well.

It is a difficult--some would say impossible--moment to be a leader of any organization. Like the rest of us, but maybe even more so, heads and other CEOs fought through post-pandemic exhaustion to tackle the effects of inflation, economic uncertainty, and geopolitical tensions, only to arrive at another moment with the Israeli-Hamas conflict when it seems every leader and every organization is expected to have a position, albeit one that becomes polarizing right from the start.